Lost in the Suburbs: A Tribute to Jonathan Kaplan & Over the Edge

 

Over the summer, I taught a college class on 1970s movies, and one of my favorite parts was showing two movies by the always entertaining and delightfully distinct director Jonathan Kaplan: Truck Turner (1974) and Over the Edge (1979). I was very happy that both movies played well with the students and prompted lively discussions. Sadly, as the summer session was concluding, news broke that Kaplan had died Aug. 1 of liver cancer at age 77.

Students had particularly connected with Over the Edge, and one scene hit me a little differently this time around, sitting there in the classroom in the dark. Sometimes a moment in a movie locks into you, knocks you around, turns you inside out, maybe brings on the tears. It could just be the way you are feeling right then. Sometimes the scene, or the actors, or something else, strikes you so hard, just thinking about it a week later might activate Crying Time or at least Far Away Eyes Time. Lorraine Newman and Tim McIntire in American Hot Wax (1978), Eddie Albert and Ida Lupino in Out of the Fog (1941), and Sylvia Sidney and Joel McCrea  in Dead End (1937) – there are parts by those actors in those movies that just tear me up even thinking about them.

Add to that list Michael Kramer and Pamela Ludwig in Over the Edge. Carl (Kramer) runs away from home and holes up in an unfinished condominium, his world in turmoil after the death of his best friend, Richie (Matt Dillon), at the hands of Officer Doberman, a local rabid cop played by Kaplan regular Harry Northup. Carl has no one to turn to except for Cory (Pamela Ludwig), and he calls her on a payphone (we know it has to be her) to meet up later at the condo. She sneaks off after her parents go to bed and arrives at the condo with a sleeping bag. They sleep together and she returns home in the morning before her parents awaken.

Cory’s arrival: a teenage prayer delivered in the dark by a girl who apparently dreamed of big trucks and lost highways. She tells Carl a story about a female trucker, a 95-pound “gypsy of the road” who has given her a new idea for a potential career path, and a fucking way out of New Granada, Colorado. In the morning, she stands at the door of the condo and stares out at the road at a traveling truck, awakening to new possibilities for the future, before slipping back into the reality of needing to get home before her dad wakes up for work.

She had almost made Carl a statistic earlier at the condo while doing an ill-advised “gun dance” to a stolen radio playing Cheap Trick. Only moments before she had told him, “You have pretty eyelashes.” Richie reads the scene perfectly after Carl fake dies: “I bet you’re in love with her now that she almost blew your brains out.”

Construction trash litters the outside of the half-finished condo, a secret hideaway that Richie and Carl have claimed as their own. “My father said they ran out of money,” Carl says. It’s another reminder of the failures of this town, of development at any cost, an attitude that has made the teenagers and  their lives far less important than property values, which comes out explicitly at the explosive community meeting following Richie’s death.

Cory and Carl talk briefly about women truckers and remember Richie, but Cory gets cold, and they both end up in the sleeping bag, which she says she used to play in when she was little.

“You know, I think you’re really beautiful,” Carl tells Cory. “No,” I’m not,” she says. “I think you are,” Carl says.

Then they kiss and pull the sleeping bag over their heads. It’s a touching moment and both young actors are so incredibly tender in the moment. Kaplan captures it all so beautifully, so sweetly.

In the morning, Kaplan frames them kissing in the doorway as the sun is rising. They look like Wild West lovers embracing before the final shootout. And as Cory walks away, it’s a lovely shot of her, looking back at Carl, still standing at the door, as she, and this magical moment in their teenage lives, fades away.

It’s a powerfully emotional scene, and it’s a testament to the powers of Jonathan Kaplan and the classic movies and moments he directed.